Friday, September 26, 2014

"Here Be Dragons" is what was assumed to have been written on the old maps when the mapmaker didn't know anything about some far distant area. I always loved that optimistic statement! The dragons must be somewhere, after all. But it looks as if the only place where that sentence truly was written was on one old globe.

I was reminded of those lovely dragons when I read this article about how American conservatives view American liberals. Two snippets:

Here’s the view from the Heritage Foundation: Liberalism creates self-indulgent, licentious hedonists willing to cede every other kind of freedom to an increasingly authoritarian government.“Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license,” said Heritage’s David Azerrad, describing the reigning philosophy of the left. “It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself—it’s the permission to indulge.”

But liberalism isn’t just about pleasure-seeking and moral relativity: The oppressive nature of liberal government has crept into our popular culture as well, warns Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books. Coupled with the demand for tolerance and self-actualization is the growing tyranny of political correctness.According to liberals’ worldview, “humans are too psychologically frail to maintain their self-esteem when faced with harsh criticism,” he said.“Fairness then requires protection against not only sticks and stones, but against names, dirty looks, inappropriate laughter, white privilege, and ‘mansplaining’ that could generate a feeling of the inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect people’s hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone,” Voegeli concluded. Nothing less than the future of freedom as we know it is at stake. “What will then be left of what Madison called ‘the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America, the spirit which nourishes freedom and in return is nourished by it’?” wondered Azerrad.

The emphasis is mine.

This is fascinating stuff. I never realized that I'm fleeing freedom and have lost my manly and vigilant spirit or that I was getting so much hot sex that my ability to take any kind of criticism has been sucked out of me.

Then, of course, my map would have the dragons in a completely different place, because freedom for Mr. Azerrad or Mr. Voegeli means something rather different than freedom for women or racial minorities or poor people etc. Indeed, descriptions of the above type must imagine what dragons might look like, what they might eat, how they might fly, how they might procreate and so on. When that information is lacking, make assumptions!

And the same could go in reverse. Knowing that hampers my gleeful writing here. But at least I have learned something about a few on the US right edge: They think liberals are willing to give up everything for sex* (even though my following various events suggests that newsworthy sexual escapades and even sexual crimes are certainly at least as common among Republican politicians and clergy as they are among Democratic politicians and clergy, and probably more so) and they seem to have a very specific definition of "freedom."

I'm not sure what "freedom" means in Republicanese, but it might mean power in the hands of a particular group of people and not in the hands of other groups of people. The latter groups are expected to meekly accept their places in the hierarchy, led by others and managed by conservative religions.

That came across all Marxist! Gulp. I'm not a Marxist, though he did ask some of the right questions. In fact, I'm probably not even a liberal, what with a dearth of sexual escapades and no obvious desire to have the whole world run by governments (or the corporations or the various religious bosses).

The liberal dragons drawn on those conservative maps are weird stereotypes. The same would be equally true of conservative dragons drawn on liberal maps, or at least somewhat true. That is sad, because the lack of proper communication is one reason for the infected politics of this country today.

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*This one makes me a bit confused. Notice that it's the political right which is the home of those who writediatribes (content warning for those two) about the need for women to take responsibility for becoming victims of sexual violence and notice that the concerns about sexual violence are portrayed as political correctness gone amok. Then there's the idea that the alleged victims of sexual violence exaggerate, label bad sex as rape and so on. As far as I can tell all this comes from rather righty places.

So the definition of who is entitled to licentiousness and/or safety might matter in understanding the concerns in the quote.

Kimberly Guilfoyle took a moment to salute Major Mariam Al Mansouri, who reportedly led her country's airstrikes Monday against the Islamic State. Guilfoyle noted how rich it was that an Arab woman was leading the charge against the militant group, given that women aren't even allowed to drive in some countries in the region."The problem is after she bombed it she couldn't park it," co-host Greg Gutfield quipped. "I salute her.""Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?" Eric Bolling chimed in.

This isn't even about inappropriateness or tone-deafness. I truly can't imagine how someone would come up with those particular jokes in that context.

How does the internal conversation go: "Well, those Muslim countries really are awful about the way they treat women. But let's insert a few jokes about how even crack pilots can't park if they are female and about the fact that women have bigger breasts than men! That way we show...what? That Greg and Eric really do understand why the Saudis don't let women drive cars?"

Is not 42. It's blackcurrant juice. Well, blackcurrant juice is as good an answer as any I can think of. It also happens to be what I'm drinking right now.

That paragraph is offered as a humble parable of some of what's going on in our public conversations.

Take the Emma Watson post I wrote below. I kept it back for a few days, I used multiple respectable sources and so on. But then we learn that the site itself is a hoax site, except that it's a hoax site in a deeper sense than wanting to, say, cause havoc among the 4Chan lot. It's a hoax about a hoax about a hoax? And I'm not at all sure who it is intended to hurt or if that even matters. It's so meta that there's nowhere further out to go, no way to wrap everything into an even larger cloak of opinions, emotions, static and clickbaits, no way to dance even faster on that narrow fence between reality and something with pink clowns and frilly monsters.

Now that I got that off my chest let's see if I can write anything real.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

That's about right, based on my experience of too many hours spent on reading the comments threads. Not all the comments are just plain misogynists but a very large percentage of them are. Then there are the comments about feminism as a cancer on the body politics, something more dangerous than wars and epidemics and extreme Islamist takeover fears (though at least the feminazis get properly squashed by that last nightmare).

That's the background to the most recent story about Emma Watson who played Hermione in the Harry Potter movies.* She gave a speech to the United Nations. The speech is well worth reading in its entirety, because though it's not deep in research or in information it makes the case for more need for women's and men's rights in this world quite well.

What happened next? This: The merry boyz at the hacker site 4Chan decided to show Emma who really is the boss in this world by informing all of us* that nude pictures of her would soon be made available. The justification seems to be in her daring to give that speech. As a deleted comment at Gawker supposedly stated:

“She makes stupid feminist speeches at UN, and now her nudes will be online,” one comment allegedly read, adding that the images are set to appear in under five days.

The site threatening Watson was greeted with glee on 4chan and Reddit,
where commenters explicitly stated their hope that the threats would
force her to abandon her feminist campaigning. "If only her nudes got
leaked and she had the load on her face. Her feminism kick would be
over," a commenter wrote. "If this is true her recent feminism rally is
going to be shutdown hard," wrote another. "Feminism," one 4chan user
opined, "is a growing cancer."

There you have it. Now the 4Chan and Reddit brigades are not representative of all mankind (used properly, for once!). But we don't need very many people willing to smear someone's reputation on the Internet or to pass on false rumors about her death or to threaten her with death or rape to make public speaking on certain topics pretty expensive for women like Emma Watson.

Indeed, the only deeper motivation for all that I see is the idea of silencing such voices. If they only were silent! Mary Beard has written extensively on the possibility that the Internet harassment of women and of feminists is about silencing people by making the costs of speaking very high.

A shallower analysis suggests that the idea of nude pictures of women is somehow the proper punishment to feminist speech. A nude woman cannot be feminist, nudity is bad, it takes away a "good" woman's reputation. But why would the boys (and girls?) at 4Chan think so?

My guess is that some of them do think so, because women are either whores or Madonnas and as we know Virgin Mary never said anything except "your will shall be done" and whores are raucous. So silence is what good women should cover themselves with.

On the other hand, the move to publish nude pictures of Emma Watson (whether they exist or not) is also to declare public ownership of her sexuality. Any man can ogle at her and she cannot stop them!

The private and public ownership models of women's sexuality are used side by side on this old earth. Thus, we get the nude pictures of women who are deemed to be publicly owned and we get the color-coded burqas in Mosul under the Islamic State for married and unmarried women. So that everyone knows which ones have not yet been doled out to their proper private owners and are therefore available?

I'm probably over-analyzing the reasons that makes a bunch of teenaged boyz feel powerful on the net. But even if they are teenagers who haven't really thought all this through very carefully the outcomes are the same: A breach in that public/private ownership wall, the hope that someone's reputation can be ground to shards under the big boots, the unthinking equation of equal gender rights with feminazi thuggery and so on.

For note that the response from those who seem to disagree with Watson's message is not to discuss the message, to debate it, to suggest alternatives or different angles. It's just to punish Watson for speaking. It also suggests a vast lack of information about how the majority of women on this earth live and how limited their rights are and how little they are respected as anything but fertility resources. An American privileged point for misogyny.

This could be a storm in the teacup in the sense that we cannot tell how common the views and behaviors of the 4Chan people are. But that's the general problem with Internet debates, with what is stressed and with what slides by almost unnoticed.

For different reactions to these events, check out here and here.
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*Added later: Even if the website threatening to release the Emma Watson nude pictures is itself a hoax as this article argues, the analysis in this post applies to public speech by women on the net.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

This poor post puts together all my little ideas which were not watered enough to become sturdy trees on this here blog. Also a few smaller items which I found interesting. Much of this is depressing stuff but not all, partly because several items are about something that wouldn't even have been talked about a generation ago. Now enough people get enraged and the conversation happens.

2. Some interesting statistical and survey pieces (yes, Virginia, statistics can be delicious and exciting!). First, this piece on the disappearing US economic middle class is worth reading and thinking about. I haven't spent enough time figuring out if everything relevant is included but the statistics show that something changed around year 2000.

Second, the responses to this Gallup survey about the ethics and morality of various items is also interesting. The differences between what Democrats, Independents and Republicans find most revolting is very informative:

Republicans, independents, and Democrats have differing views of the morality of several issues. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to consider issues like divorce, gambling, medical research using embryos, and having a baby outside of wedlock morally acceptable. But Republicans are more likely than Democrats to see wearing fur, the death penalty, and medical testing on animals as morally acceptable. Independents tend to fall in the middle of the two groups.

At least the vast majority of Americans finds birth control morally AOK. That's worth thinking about in the context of the Hobby Lobby decision and the suggestion (here) that the religious right will not be satisfied until it is their religious right to ban other people from accessing birth control.

Third, the question of the world population growth isn't as clear-cut as earlier rounds of predictions implied. Because resource availability is linked with potential future wars and climate change and because population growth makes such wars more likely knowing about this altered prediction matters.

3. The summer of rage in the gaming industry: If you know nothing about this topic you might wish to begin with this calm article in the Boston Globe. Slightlyless calmtakesare available in large numbers. (You might wish to think before you read those last two links. They are pretty full of generalized misogyny.)

Though I haven't followed the summer of rage in any great detail (lying on the grass and watching the patterns white clouds make against the blue sky is much better for one's mental health), the way things are going offers an interesting natural experiment on what happens when girls try to enter the extremist type of boys' tree-house. It's more complicated than that, but the essential aspect of the anger is of the "barbarians are coming" type.

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